Nothing feels worse than a broken heart, the kind you get when someone you love ends the relationship. Feelings of shame, remorse, grief, rage, and terror can overwhelm even the most heretofore stable human being. Heartbreak has the power to reframe a workable life as a disaster.

Surprisingly, Buddhism has a tremendous amount of helpful advice for working with these terrible girl/boy-loses-boy/girl emotions. It takes an approach that is quite different than the usual advice books, which basically fall into one of two categories:

The first category is called “You Go Girl!!” (Sorry guys, all the books are aimed at women.) This kind of book suggests that you need to up the cocktails:sobbing ratio, that if you go out with your friends who all tell you that you were just too awesome for him/her, get a cute outfit and a new ‘do, and cry on as many shoulders as possible, you can dance your troubles away.

I don’t think this is bad advice. Hey! You are awesome! You can look super hot! You have great friends who remind you how to have fun! This is all cool. It won’t, however, do much to alleviate the pain, beyond stuffing it for a few hours.

The second category is called “There is something very, very wrong with you and you made this happen.” This is the kind of book that says you brought this heartbreak on yourself by carrying forward unhealed wounds from childhood or, god forbid, by thinking the wrong thoughts. I kind of hate this. Of course it’s really, really important to heal your wounds and to examine your thoughts to see if they might be sabotaging you—but when the intention for doing so is to avoid pain rather than increase your capacity to love, it is unlikely to heal you. This kind of advice is often out to convince you that you can create a safe world for yourself and that you can make love safe.

Love can never be made safe. It is the opposite of safe. The moment you try to make it safe, it ceases to be love. I realize this is a bummer, but think about it. Love is predicated on receptivity, on opening up again and again and again to your beloved, each time afresh. To do this, you have to let go of insisting that he or she conform to your standards for what a lover should look like, do, be, say, and instead allow him or her to simply be him or herself. Then you take it from there. To do otherwise, to continually choose who you wish this person was over who he or she actually is, is, well, it’s not love. I don’t know what it is. (Of course none of this stands to reason should any form of emotional or physical abuse be present. At this point you can forget everything I just said and protect yourself.)

Most often, the efforts to heal a broken heart center around putting it behind you and recreating the illusion of safety. Buddhism counsels something else, something best said by the American Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron: “Feel the feelings. Drop the story.” That is the pith advice and it means turning toward what you feel, not away. It means letting the feelings be just what they are without trying to explain them, shore your self up, or excuse or blame anyone. This is called being a warrior. The more you allow feelings to burn clean in this way, the less confusion you create.

I have three suggestions for figuring out how to accomplish this very mysterious feat of feeling without attaching a narrative as to what it might, could, should, or dare not mean.

1. Develop a non-judgmental relationship with your mind. This is best done through the practice of meditation, instruction here. When you’re under the sway of strong emotion, you come into contact with a state of being that I like to call Insane Obsessive Thinking. If only, I should have, what I really meant was, how dare she, I am a loser, you are a loser, love stinks… On and on and on. It’s really quite painful. Without addressing a mind run amuck, the chances of skillfully working with your feelings is kind of limited. So I suggest introducing a note of discipline to your everyday life, beginning today. Spend some time everyday, not squashing your icky thoughts and promoting your good ones, but simply watching your mind in a relaxed way—no matter how wild it gets, you can remain steady. This is what meditation teaches you how to do.

The mind of heartbreak is like a wild horse. You can’t just jump on and except to ride. It will throw you again and again. So instead you hang around for a while until a sense of trust develops. Meditation teaches you how to do this, too.

2. Stabilize your heart in the open state. When you regain some sense of dominion in your own mind, naturally your attention will turn toward that raging, screaming, 24/7 searing thing in the middle of your chest—your heart.

One way to look at heartbreak is as love unbound from an object. Freed, it careens and ricochets and crashes into walls. Your capacity and longing for love is enormous and when you lose it, this is what you discover. You had no idea you could feel this raw, vulnerable, open…and it’s the openness that is so precious.

Buddhism does not counsel closing back up, not at all. Instead, in recognition that this openness is the ground of loving kindness, compassion, and the ability to connect deeply, it suggests you leave it broken and seek to stabilize it in the open state. Yes, leave it broken. The way to do this and not walk around sobbing all the time is through the practice of Loving Kindness meditation, which you can find here. In this way, you begin to shift your search for love a tiny bit, away from “I want to find someone to love me” and toward “I want to find a way to give love.” With this slight transition, the whole world changes.

When most people say they are looking for love, what they means is they are looking for someone to love them, and then they will return it. But you can turn this equation on its head entirely and have love in your life every single day by choosing to give it. This, by the way—giving love to others—is the secret, guaranteed, no fail way to heal your broken heart. Try it.

3. View your whole life as path. With a sense of clarity in your mind and stability in your heart, the third stage becomes something altogether different. There is no practice associated with this one. With mental clarity and emotional stability comes the ability to see your entire life as path. You have created the foundation for an entirely authentic life, one full of joy and sorrow, meetings and partings, giving and taking, and deep meaning. The dark power of heartbreak has led you there.

With this openness, you see that your life is telling a story. I have no idea what it is and you may not either. But trust me, your life has a life of its own and the violence of heartbreak has the power to shatter all illusions about who you thought you were and reintroduce you instead to who you already know you are. This is an extremely powerful situation.

With a broken heart, you see how vast your longing for love is and how impossible it is to make love safe. It’s just not possible. So what do you do with these two truths? This is your path. No one can tell you how to reconcile them. The place to begin is by paying attention, by cultivating agenda-less awareness of yourself, others, and of the flow of life. When you do so, you start to notice that every single day, you are continuously cycling in and out of moments of falling in love and having your heart broken. Both are always present, shifting toward you and away, each one a tiny lesson on how to be fully alive.

I was thinking this morning on the way to work just how unsettling it is to open up and relate to someone else. I thought of the analogy of ice/water/vapor and how much safer ice appears to be sometimes. I think I can protect my heart that way, but of course sealing it away in a block of ice is a painful thing to do. It’s only protective in the way that you’re hiding it from others, and even worse from yourself. When I start to open up and let the heat begin to melt it, it no longer feels solid. But of course solid is something that doesn’t really exist. Becoming water means that you won’t have control over where you flow to. Water will follow the natural path wherever it leads. There’s no way to stop that. I suppose the water could eventually pool somewhere in a lake or run to the ocean. Then will come a time when the heat will turn you to vapor which eventually turns back to water and rains down again.

Makes me think of that old Simon and Garfunkel song lyric:

A winter’s day
In a deep and dark December;
I am alone,
Gazing from my window to the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

I’ve built walls,
A fortress deep and mighty,
That none may penetrate.
I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain.
It’s laughter and it’s loving I disdain.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

Don’t talk of love,
But I’ve heard the words before;
It’s sleeping in my memory.
I won’t disturb the slumber of feelings that have died.
If I never loved I never would have cried.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

I know this sounds harsh or even drastic. But I had to delve into the worst consequences of relationship addictions just in case yours is only budding. If you catch yourself getting into the habit of jumping into a relationship immediately in order to avoid the pain of being alone, just remember that pain is actually a good thing. If you can refrain from jumping into a relationship, that pain is what motivates you to rediscover yourself—how you like to spend your time, how you want to live your life.

You need to learn that you can be completely happy on your own, because once you know that, you won’t feel so desperate to fill that hole in your life.

It won’t even feel like that hole is there. And it’s only when you really don’t feel you need a relationship, that you will have clear enough vision to evaluate a new one.

Nobody loves you. Your mom doesn’t count. She has to love you, legally. You’re single. Some fear it. Some revere it. Some choose it. Some have it forced upon them. No matter, being single is a fantastic thing. It gives you a chance to love someone who will always love you back, yourself. (And I don’t mean “love yourself” in the tissues and hand lotion kind of way.) It’s a chance to get to know yourself as you never have. (I know this looks bad, but I swear this isn’t masturbation innuendo.) And a chance to realize you don’t need another person to be satisfied. (Okay, maybe that one was a little bit).

This post is NOT about how being single is better than being in a relationship. For some that may be the case, others it’s not. It’s also not about how being single means you can go around…

For Bella DePaulo, Marriage Optional isn’t just one of our Top 10 Trends for 2012, it’s a way of life. The visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, calls herself, and millions of other men and women, “single at heart.” A prolific commentator and writer, DePaulo has authored three books on singles, including her latest, Singlism: What It Is, Why It Matters and How to Stop It. She is also a frequent contributor to Psychology Today. She talked to us about why more women are choosing singlehood over the married life and why it should matter to marketers.

Kate Bolick’s recent article in The Atlantic, “All the Single Ladies,” got a lot of press. She emphasizes shifting economics and the shrinking pool of marriageable men. What other drivers are at work here?

Some people just really like their single lives. I call them “single at heart.” They’re not unlucky in love, they don’t have issues, they are not too picky. And if you’re single at heart as I am, it doesn’t matter whether there enough men who are taller than you or making more money. If you really love living single, all that stuff doesn’t matter.